On Feb 19, 2013, at 10:16 AM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> Joe,
>> On 18/02/2013 17:13, Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr) wrote:
>> On 2/17/13 1:17 AM, "Brian E Carpenter" <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>>> On 16/02/2013 22:49, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
>>>> Conversely, why should the canonical format be required to support page
>>>> numbers?
>>> I think Ran already answered that - for unambiguous ease of reference
>>> (especially if a document happens to contain very long sections that
>>> span more than one page).
>>>> If you made the requirement "capability for fine-grained references", you
>> would be speaking requirements language instead of implementation language.
>> OK, what I mean (and I suspect Ran too) is:
>> "capability for fine-grained references when working with a printable format."
>> That's old-fashioned, I know. However, you are advocating fine-grained
> references via anchors, which is:
>> "capability for fine-grained references when working with a hypertext format."
>> The question before the house is whether we want both of these, or only one.
I think you can have both. Suppose our paginated format (whether we call it canonical or not) is some word processor format, or more likely PDF. We can leave some room in the margin (whether it's A4 or US) and number the paragraphs. In fact this can also be done in HTML, although there are other ways to mark paragraph numbers.
Some people use printed output, some view stuff in a browser, and some would like to use a dedicated reader (like Acrobat or Word). I think references to a particular point in the document should be usable with any of those. By numbering paragraphs (perhaps with Roman numerals to avoid confusing with section numbers) we can get a pointer format that works with all of them. Anything related to page number is only usable on the one paginated format. Even better, this removes the requirement to have all paginated formats paged the same.
Yoav